Main menu

The music video is starting to shape up nicely and you can expect clips soon, in the meantime please enjoy this guest post from the Halcyon Days drummer David Brown on how the song and the music video came about:

The idea for ‘presence’ came from a news story I read in a national paper. It must have been about May or June last year and the article mentioned that a badly decomposed body had been found in a flat somewhere in London. Following the forensics it turned out that the person must have died around Christmas time the previous year. It seemed so sad to me; that a person could not be missed for such a long time. When I thought of this person I imagined what the flat must have looked like; them in a chair surrounded by Christmas decorations and unopened presents. With this image in my head the first line of the song was born: ‘A decomposed body lies next to a pile of unopened presents’. The rest followed quite naturally. I saw the song as a way of remembering the person who had died and atoning for their forgotten life. I called the song ‘presence’ because it is about a person’s existence but it is also a play on the use of ‘presents’ in the song.

The wasteground back in January

In terms of style of the music video, there was much discussion about how we could convey the story of the song. All sorts of ideas came out – filming the whole thing in a graveyard, being in the person’s flat, capturing the last few days of their life but in the end we decided that none of these would do the song justice. Originally the intention was to focus on Sy (Lead singer) singing the verses as he walks around various locations and then bring the band in for the chorus. The idea was that Sy could be walking down any street, anywhere and there might just be a person laying forgotten in one of the houses he walked past. The chorus was shot in a wasteland which represented a kind of purgatory for a forgotten soul. However, we liked the wasteland setting so much it might just be that the final product sees the whole song set in the wasteland. We will have to wait and see!